There are no decent alternatives to YouTube. | Hacker News Reader

There are no decent alternatives to YouTube.

3 pointsColinWright7 comments

I freely admit that it's somewhat irrational, but I really hate Google, and I really don't like the YouTube ecosystem. But I've been persuaded to embark on a "short math videos" project, and there's no way my own website can host more than the first 10 or 20.

I've been investigating other options, but they're all ... sub-optimal. Vimeo? PeerTube? Nothing has the features that YouTube offers.

If you made a video and wanted to avoid YouTube ... what would you use?

View on HN

I saw this posted on HN yesterday. I know nothing about it (and I try to avoid anything that mentions blockchain), but it might be of interest for a self-contained project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22785644

https://lbry.com/

Code is the ultimate form of data compression. 1080p is an inefficient way to display four lines of LaTeX on a screen for fifteen seconds. Javascript to decode LaTex only has to be downloaded once and sent to cache. Your talking head can be in the corner. The InfoQ aesthetic is small live video, big slides, and good audio.

To put it another way, hosting your own video is a mathematical problem. Other than good audio tools, you probably have everything you need to make something excellent. Get good audio tools. Please.

bit out of the box, but you could probably be successful with twitch.tv, getting them on there take some extra time tho

You can upload video to a video CDN and display it on your own web page.

I've had no luck in trying to make sense of the video CDN infrastructure and ecosystem. They seem designed for something completely different to what I've trying to do, and inappropriate. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, or reading the wrong things, but people say "Just use a video CDN" and it just all looks irrelevant, inappropriate, or unusable.

Maybe I'm expecting it to be too simple and straight-forward, and everyone has to go through the same gazillion steps. No wonder YouTube is winning.

Quick example, fastly.com[0]

First 10 TB, $0.12. Sounds brilliant. Minimum per month, $50. Less brilliant.

Complete mis-match with my use case.

[0] https://www.fastly.com/pricing

Fast.ly has great marketing but I don't see where the value comes from.

I have tested this service from AWS

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

with friends n' family but haven't used it for production. It looks pretty complicated, but I think you could find a script somewhere that packs up your video properly and uploads it, you could get it down to one step and probably make it easier to upload than Youtube in the long term.

I think the biggest reason why Youtube wins is being free, plus also being a big community with a lot of discovery. AWS does not have a minimum so it is better than fast.ly in that respect.

Thanks I'll check that out.

I've also had PeerTube recommended.

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